Heading North up the Pacific Coast

Apr 14, 2015

Leaving Eureka was done in bright sun yet the tempurature was a tad cool... but we both still wore our shorts and tee's.

As an aside, Mike found this a strange experience... when he worked in the Arctic with the weather department, he lived for a while in Eureka NWT... the far north one and now he had a chance to spend some time in another Eureka. Very different to say the least.

Today's drive was really just the same thing over and over again... ocean views, ocean water splashing massive rocks, water the colour of turquoise, green, white and light blue. Mind you it was broken up with inland drives through huge trees (very close to the road) and narrow roads, some farm fields (first for the grazing cows but they turned into red cranberry fields) then back to the ocean and more beach and waves.

When you look in the book about drives up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, it goes on and on how beautiful the drive is, its the best you could ever dream of... when you talk to regular RV types who do this trek year after year, they tell you that you should take #5. You only need to do this highway once or twice every 10 years and only if you have lots of time, patience and are in a car. It is truly a memory for life...

Unfortunately, we've had so many beautiful experiences that we have used up our allotment of pictures for the blog, hence only three today. But, you can only look at so many pictures of rocks, waves and big trees, right? One thing we didn't get a picture of, yesterday there was yellow and orange buttercups all along the highway, but today it switched to wild daisies, pretty to see. Oh, and we saw our first Bald Eagle in flight swooping down over a bog, when we were trying to spy some elk. There were warnings all along the road for Elk and rocks, we saw rocks but no Elk :-(

This part of our trip has been a wonderful journey along the Pacific ocean. We wake up on the ocean, we follow the highway on the ocean and then each evening we find a parking spot on the ocean.

Right after leaving California, we stopped for lunch in Bookings Harbor, one last chance for Clam Chowder in a bread bowl, crab cakes and tater tots. We had a short burst of rain, but by not pushing too hard we stayed behind the rain and had sun all the way to Coos Bay, Oregon. Turns out just inland from here was a tornado which did serious some damage in Eugene, Oregon but we did good by not going too fast, or too far inland.

We have certainly been through a lot of change from the desert of Arizona to the now much more familiar trees and grass of the northern coast in the past 7 days, everything seems so green.

Tomorrow we will head north to Lincoln and then we leave the ocean for the last time (sad face!) and go inland through Portland and once again... we have no idea where we will park for the night.